The influential Kentucky lawmaker's aides fired off a letter to the Pentagon, demanding answers. The senator got one, but probably not the response he was expecting.

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Paul Szoldra, then a Marine Corps Lance Corporal, posing on a patrol in eastern Afghanistan in 2005.
Paul Szoldra

The Defense Department doesn't offer military benefits to dangerous detainees. Mr. McConnell's staff had been duped by the Duffel Blog, a year-old satirical website that is gaining a reputation as the military version of The Onion.

Mr. McConnell and his staff aren't the only ones to be snookered. Over the past year, the Duffel Blog has hoodwinked radio talk-show hosts, politicians and reporters across the country.

No, the U.S. Army is not going to replace bayonets with tomahawks.

No, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is not going to start charging soldiers for access to military bases.

No, mail delays did not prevent delivery of thousands of military ballots that would have propelled Republican Mitt Romney into the White House.

The year-old Duffel Blog is the creation of Paul Szoldra, a 29-year-old Marine Corps veteran who started the website as a way to drive traffic to a serious site he had set up to help military veterans adjust to civilian life.

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Paul Szoldra

The first piece of satire profiled an Air Force officer who was so sick of being teased about serving in the "Chair Force" that he banned all chairs from his military base.

Mr. Szoldra's humor caught on. His serious website fell apart. And the Duffel Blog took on a life of its own. The site's FacebookFB-1.26% page now has more than 46,000 followers, and Mr. Szoldra says a half-million people check out the Duffel Blog each month.

"The lads have a well-tuned sense of humor and convincingly imaginative 'reporting' that bode well for a country that could use some laughs," said Marine Gen. James "Mad Dog" Mattis, who just retired as head of U.S. Central Command. "I think the writers know that we need to stop taking ourselves so seriously."

Over the past year, Mr. Szoldra has enlisted help from a growing number of anonymous writers, including active duty military officers, who feed the Duffel Blog with a daily stream of fake news.

The fake news site has run stories about everything from a hipster antiwar activist who joined the army "to be ironic" to a Taliban proposal that the U.S. military offer a 24-hour "call ahead" policy before launching night raids in Afghanistan.

There have been articles about a soldier kicked out of Special Forces because he couldn't grow a beard, a typo that led to the creation of an $180 million "gorilla warfare" program and a congressional study that concluded that the sword is, in fact, mightier than the pen.

The Duffel Blog has become an outlet for Mr. Szoldra and his writers to vent about their frustrations with military culture. And it is proving to be cathartic for other veterans too.

"I've gotten messages from guys saying 'I have PTSD and your website is the only thing that's able to make me laugh,' " he said. "It makes the site much more important to me and very important to them. I really don't want to let them down."

The Duffel Blog is read by everyone from soldiers in Afghanistan to high-level officers at the Pentagon.

Gen. Joseph Dunford, the Marine officer who recently took over as head of the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan, said he got a "good laugh" out of a Duffel Blog story that touted his decision to take on the "haunted command" in Kabul that has proved to be a career killer for his predecessors.

Mr. Szoldra and his writers revel in the number of people who take their satire seriously. The group keeps a private, online "wall of shame" to document controversies they stir up. Snopes.com, the website committed to debunking urban legends, misinformation and Onion-style fake articles, has already created three entries on Duffel Blog stories to let readers know they aren't real.

One of the entries was on an article claiming an Army general's profanity-laden graduation address sparked a deadly riot at Fort Benning, in Georgia.

The story was written by an active duty soldier in Afghanistan, who called it the crowning achievement of his fake news career. After the piece was published last July, an officer at his base in Afghanistan passed around copies for people to read—not knowing that the author was among them.

"It was all I could do to not take a bow," the soldier, who writes under the name Army J, said in a phone interview.

Perhaps their biggest "get" so far has been Sen. McConnell. Last fall, the senator's office wrote to the Pentagon after a constituent raised concerns about the story claiming that Guantanamo Bay detainees were eligible for military benefits.

Don Stewart, a spokesman for Mr. McConnell, said the office is "hypervigilant about finding answers to the questions raised by his constituents."

"In this case," he said of the letter, first published earlier this year by Wired Magazine's Danger Room, "that extra effort produced a humorous misunderstanding."

The Duffel Blog has its detractors. Among the irate is Martin Sepulveda, a military veteran who unsuccessfully ran for Congress last year in Arizona.

When the Duffel Blog published a fake news story claiming that a real Arizona lawmaker had told the troops to "go f— themselves," Mr. Sepulveda dispatched a tweet denouncing the politician. When Mr. Sepulveda learned the story was fake, he turned his furor toward the Duffel Blog, calling it "malicious and cowardly."

"I don't think you want to say vile things that aren't true to get some reaction," he says.

The fake article created an even bigger problem for its target—Arizona State Sen. Linda Lopez. One person close to the senator called it a "PR nightmare."

"It took a lot of time to undo the damage that was done," said the Democrat close to Ms. Lopez, who declined to be interviewed. "The repercussions lasted for weeks and months."

Asked about that incident, Mr. Szoldra, who is currently covering real news as an intern in New York for the Business Insider website, said he shouldn't "be responsible for people believing everything they read" on his site.

"Incidents like this only illustrate a serious problem with our education system," he said. "Apparently, they aren't teaching skepticism or critical thinking in some parts of the country anymore."

Perhaps the biggest sign of the Duffel Blog's growing stature came from Scott Dikkers, founding editor of The Onion, who reached out to Mr. Szoldra with praise for his work. "The site reminds me of The Onion in its early days," Mr. Dikkers says. "They're clearly having fun doing it, which is part of what makes it successful."

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